As we share our new
innovations for every developer at Connect(); 2018
today, I’m reminded that now, more than ever, we’re moving towards a
world of ubiquitous computing where technology is responsible for
transforming every consumer and business experience. For developers,
the opportunity to use technologies like AI, IoT, serverless
compute, containers and more has never been greater. I’m excited to
share some of the latest things we’re working on at Microsoft to
help developers achieve more when building the applications of
tomorrow, today.

Tools for
every developer

As a company built by
developers and for developers, we understand the opportunities and
challenges that developers face every day. Today, we are continuing
to deliver developer tools and Azure services that help you be more
innovative and productive than ever.

I’m excited to
announce the general availability of
Azure Machine Learning service,
which enables developers and data scientists to efficiently build,
train and deploy machine learning models. Using Azure Machine
Learning, you can automate model selection and tuning, increase
productivity with DevOps for machine learning, and deploy models
with one click. With its tool-agnostic Python SDK, Azure Machine
Learning service can be used in any Python environment with your
favorite open source frameworks.

Over 12 million
developers around the world use Visual Studio to build new
applications and enhance existing ones. Today, Visual Studio 2019
Preview and Visual Studio 2019 for Mac Preview
are available for download. With numerous improvements to
capabilities like IntelliCode for AI-assisted IntelliSense, expanded
refactoring capabilities and smarter debugging, developers can spend
more time focusing on writing code. Developers can now collaborate
in real time with Live Share and the new GitHub pull request
capabilities. And developers using Azure will find better support
than ever, whether you’re modernizing with containers or building
cloud-native solutions with serverless technology.

.NET Core 3 Preview
is now available, bringing the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
and Windows Forms application frameworks to .NET Core. This enables
more flexible deployment with side-by-side and self-contained EXEs,
better performance and the ability to use native Universal Windows
Platform (UWP) controls in Windows Forms and WPF applications via
XAML islands. On the server side, check out composable UIs with
ASP.NET Core using Razor Components, which provide full-stack web
development with .NET for the first time.

For developers
looking to build cloud-native, data-driven applications, Azure
Cosmos DB offers a fully managed, globally distributed database
which supports NoSQL workloads and guarantees less than
10-millisecond low latency and high availability. Today, we’re
announcing the general availability of Azure Cosmos DB Shared
Throughput Offer
with a lowered minimum entry of 400 request units or $24 per month —
a 25 times lower entry point — which makes Azure Cosmos DB more
accessible to developers who have databases with multiple ‘Azure
Cosmos DB containers’.

Microsoft <3
open source

At the heart of great
developer innovation is community, and that’s why to open source is
so important. We’re committed to empowering developers at every
stage of the development lifecycle — from ideation to collaboration
to deployment. Our announcements today are not only about
open-sourcing more of our own products for community collaboration
and contribution, but how we are also actively investing in
collaborating on initiatives with others.

Modern container
applications often include a variety of components such as
containers, databases and virtual machines, and therefore need an
easy way to package and maintain the apps in different environments.
Today, I’m excited to introduce Cloud Native Application
Bundles (CNAB),
a new open source package format specification created in close
partnership with Docker and supported by HashiCorp, Bitnami and
more. With CNAB, you can manage distributed applications using a
single installable file, reliably provision application resources in
different environments and easily manage the application lifecycle
without having to use multiple toolsets.

A year ago, we
introduced Virtual Kubelet,Virtual Kubelet (VK), providing a
pluggable architecture to extend the Kubernetes API to deploy and
manage containers in compute environments like serverless and edge.
Since then, a number of VK providers have been added, enabling
integrations with multiple services such as Azure Container
Instances, AWS Fargate, Alibaba ECI and Azure IoT Edge. Today, we
are donating the Virtual Kubelet
project to
the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). By working within the
CNCF, we can encourage even more participation and innovations in
the community to integrate Kubernetes orchestration with more
environments.

I’m also happy to
share that we’re delivering on top requests from the .NET community
by open-sourcing Windows Presentation
Foundation (WPF),
Windows Forms
and WinUI XAML Library
(WinUI). The
initial commits add many namespaces and APIs, with more in the
coming months. We look forward to receiving your contributions to
these repos.

Easier access to
technology enables freedom of choice for developers to select the
best solution for the project at hand. Today, we’re announcing that
the Azure Database for
MariaDB
service is now generally available. This enterprise-ready, fully
managed service for MariaDB community edition provides built-in high
availability and elastic scaling, as well as flexible pricing.

Serverless
for all

We’re excited to
bring the benefits of serverless computing to every app pattern.
Whether you are building event-driven functions, running container
workloads orchestrated by Kubernetes or simply managing APIs
implemented on any platform, you can do it all without worrying
about the underlying infrastructure.

Powered
by the open source Virtual Kubelet technology, the Azure Kubernetes Service
(AKS) virtual node public preview
enables serverless Kubernetes. With this new feature, you can
elastically provision additional compute capacity in seconds. With a
few clicks in the Azure portal, you can turn on the virtual node
capability and get the flexibility and portability of a
container-focused experience in your AKS environment without
worrying about managing the additional compute resources.

Azure Functions enables
you to build serverless, event-driven applications in the language
of your choice, including .NET, JavaScript and Java. Today, we
extend this further with Python support to Azure
Functions.
Build Linux-based functions using Python either as code or as a
Docker container, while enjoying an end-to-end development
experience — build, debug/test, publish — using local tooling such
as CLI and Visual Studio. Python support brings the serverless
approach to machine learning and automation scenarios.

These are just a few
of the new tools and services we announced today. I encourage you to
look through all the updates
and join the live interactive coding sessions at Connect(); 2018.
Tune in online
today or watch on-demand,
explore the code samples
shown throughout the event and share what you think on social media
(#MSFTConnect). I can’t wait to see what you will build next.